What is a Life Pro Tip?

A Life Pro Tip (or LPT) is a tip that improves life for you and those around you in a specific and significant way.

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I'm perfectly okay letting it buffer for a few mins while I go grab some snacks or do something productive in the meantime. Take out the trash or something, and then I get to watch HD. Also I feel like I'm becoming part of some bullshit statistic my ISP will quote, "but look at X number of people streaming in only SD, we don't need to supply good speeds for Netflix. STOP OPPRESSING OUR FREEDOM TO CAP USERS." But I digress.

won't it just force it to stream slowly and rebuffer constantly? I think the real LPT here is knowing that you can cause a slight decrease in quality in order to get a smoother stream from Netflix if need be.

I see where you are coming from, but personally i'd rather let it buffer on occasion in order to watch an hd version of a movie/show than watch a smoother one in lower quality. Either way, I hope this helps some people!

Edit: Not quite sure why people so vehemently disagree with this statement. I posted this LPT under the pretense that your internet can reasonably handle HD without major interruption. If it can't, don't use the tip.

A lot of people would rather not have it buffer. The LPT /u/omfg_the_lings suggested is probably useful to a larger majority of people who don't have the luxury of good internet and might want to stream things, but can't often successfully due to a shitty connection.

I see why you posted your LPT, but if you have a good enough connection for this to work well, wouldn't you already be streaming it in high quality?

I don't know how common this is, but from home and my work Netflix will be stuck for a couple of minutes in lower quality, even though there's more than enough bandwidth available to stream high quality. Rather than waiting for the 2-3 minutes for Netflix to register that it's okay to switch to HQ, I can force it with this method.

Every now and then it'll hiccup and turn to low quality again, but I can change it back to HQ 5 seconds later with no buffering problems. Netflix is definitely smart enough to keep the video playing, but sometimes a little push from the user helps speed up the process.

This is what happens for me. When Comcast engages SMCM (Super Mega Cunt Mode [which is surprisingly not all the time]) Netflix won't buffer to save the human race. Forcing HD just makes everything take forever and a day. When that happens usually I just crack a beer and go outside on the porch. Soon I'm going to get a VPN.

Instead of all the Ctrl+Alt+Shift+* button pressing just press Alt + Shift and left click your mouse and you get a menu to open up any of the 4 button keyboard "shortcuts".

OR:

Space – Toggle Play/Pause

Enter – Toggle Play/Pause

PgUp – Play

PgDn – Pause

F – Full-screen

Esc – Exit full-screen

Shift+Left arrow – Rewind

Shift+Right arrow – Fast Forward

Up arrow - Volume Up

Down arrow - Volume Down

M – Mute toggle

In full-screen mode:

Ctrl+space – Frame forward/backward mode.

Ctrl+space pauses the movie and enters key frame mode (aka intra-frame or i-frame mode). The right and left arrow keys then move between key frames.

The following Ctrl+Shift+Alt+* shortcuts (Ctrl+Shift+Option+* in Mac OS X) toggle information displays on/off when the player is NOT in full-screen mode. The displays will remain on, however, if full-screen mode is activated.

I have 50 MBPs internet and Netflix would only give me low quality. I damn near shat my pants when I found out about these settings, to the point I paid to upgrade to unlimited internet. It's full uncompressed 1080P, and uses 2.8GB an hour.

This happened to me when I binge-watched Supernatural. I watched way more than I'd like to admit over the course of a few weeks and all of a sudden, they stopped giving me the option for HD (they consider 3000kbps to be 720p and 1750kbps to be 480p).

I tried everything, from rebooting, to complaining on the internet, to reinstalling Silverlight, and I couldn't fix it. I was convinced it was either Netflix or my ISP either trying to tell me to chill with the incessant streaming, or them trying to cut down on bandwidth costs for high data users.

So what did I do? I pirated the next few seasons in glorious HD (with bitrates even higher than 3000) and proceeded to watch them in better quality without fiddling around with pressing ctrl-alt-shift-s on every video to get HD and I didn't experience a single stutter or buffer!

Sorry that this turned into a "and this is why people fucking pirate shit" rant, but seriously, this is why I fucking pirate shit. You give me the goddamn service I pay for or I'll get it elsewhere.

If you've stuck with me this far, I came back to Netflix a couple weeks later and lo and behold... my HD option was back.

TL;DR: You may be watching too much Netflix if you don't have the option to switch to bitrates higher than 1750kbps.

Minor correction: Bitrate and resolution are completely different things. Resolution (720p or whatever) refers to the number of pixels in a frame. Bitrate is the amount of data used per second. You could have a really low resolution with a high bitrate or a high resolution with a low bitrate. Both would look bad on a large screen.

If you want to be really technical, "resolution" isn't even the correct term. It's actually "video mode", since it only specifies the vertical resolution (and even then, that's still really stupid, because the vertical res is never constant, but the horizontal is, e.g. 1280 pixels, so they SHOULD call 720p "1280p" and 1080p "1920p", but that's a rant for another time).

What I meant was that those bitrates roughly correspond to those video modes, as per Netflix's website, so you can expect 720p HD video with 3000kbps and 480p with 1750kbps.

Really though, 3000kbps is actually on the extreme low side of what you need for transparent 720p video. The Scene uses 4000kbps as a minimum, but even then, that's only a minimum. You'd want something closer to 7000-8000kbps for a "transparent" encode, but I sure as hell don't expect Netflix or Youtube to do that, since it's a real bandwidth sucker and most people won't be able to tell the difference.

You could have a really low resolution with a high bitrate or a high resolution with a low bitrate. Both would look bad on a large screen.

And this is where the discussion steers toward YIFY and their abominations they call "encodes", but that's also a rant for another time.

I wish I had checked, but honestly I was so fed up with dealing with the other bullshit that comes along with Netflix and streaming stuff that I just said, "fuck it".

My ISP is AT&T U-verse, which I've surprisingly had no problems with (aside from atrocious speeds, etc. etc. the usual shit that comes with American ISPs). I also don't think they have the power to remove bitrate options from a website they don't have access to in a client (Silverlight) they have no stake in, so I'm almost positive Netflix is to blame.

And who knows, it might have just been some weird error on Netflix's part, but the problem persisted for several days until I stopped checking, then magically started working after I hadn't used Netflix for a while, so that spells "suspicious" to me.

What if my Internet company throttles netflix even when my DL speed is 50 down? I can barely play HD. I have tried this method before and while it works sometimes, it causes the player to buffer for what seems like an hour before I just refresh the page and try again.

He means set up a VPN so your ISP only sees encrypted VPN traffic and can't tell it's netflix. Then they deliver the "regular" data to you at your advertised speeds (in most cases) because they have no idea it's video.

Many university VPNs only allow traffic to their own internal network and academic resources like journals. Otherwise, yes, all of your traffic would be bouncing off of the university network before hitting the final server. It's like a proxy, but faster, more secure, and more general.

That is how I access the manual video quality. Now I am realizing I should not have just skimmed the title of this post. I access the stream manager through the menu that comes up with Alt+Shift+left click. The shortcut provided in the post's title opens the stream manager directly.

Thank you by the way, I will definitely try to lock the video quality higher next time and then tinker with the "A/V sync compensation."

Right? I've tried some extensive google research and all I've found is a bunch of Apple TV owners who have the same problem on what is probably on a much more frustrating level. Like I couldn't imagine dealing with this problem on a 42" television.

Is there any equivalent for this when streaming Youtube vids on an iphone5. Mine has been driving me crazy recently even if I choose the 'small' quality a five minute vid will stall halfway through and buffer forever.

I'm with you. I'd rather watch grass grow in hd than anything in crappy quality. My internet can handle it now but before I would pause my shit for 20 mins just to get a good bit of time streaming in hd. Upvote.

Netflix uses Smooth Streaming, which encodes a video at multiple bitrates, in 5-10 second chunks. Those chunks are delivered to you at the best quality you can receive depending upon what available bandwidth you have.

3000 Forces HD sounds terribly powerful even if I have no idea what it means; like when your asshole neighbor tells you about his new lawnmower that develops 100 hexajouls per square triton on a galon of Syntech.

That doesn't work for me, I have it set to the highest option preferred and it still streams in 1990s quality most of the time due to whatever CDN being used not working well (probably because it's a shitty one run by my ISP or something)

Running through a VPN however solves all that and I can pull HD streams all day long

You can get to different CDN by switching your DNS to Google's (8.8.8.8) or OpenDNS instead of using your ISP's. On the flip side, if you're using OpenDNS or Google's DNS already, it's possible that they've got a problem with their AnyCast IP resolution for your IP, meaning they'll be hooking you up with a non-optimal CDN that's too far away. If that's the case, try switching back to your ISP's CDN to see if it helps.

TL;DR; AnyCast CDN selection may be more or less optimal/accurate depending on the DNS server you use.